Betsy stops and sits on the first step and waits for Sister Mary Thomas.
When she arrives, out of breath, Sister Mary Thomas says, “Jeez, Betsy.”
“How’d you know I left?” Betsy asks.
“Sister Erin heard something and asked me to check it out. I came up and saw you leaving and followed. Aren’t you cold?”
“This sweater’s warm.”
“Where on earth are you going?”
“I want to go to the city to see a movie or something. They play movies all night.”
“You can’t just leave. You have to tell someone.”
“It’s not prison, right?”
“It’s not prison, no, but you’re thirteen. What would your folks say?”
“I don’t have folks. I have a mom and a stepdad. What does that word even mean, stepdad? Where’s it come from?”
“I don’t know. I know you can’t just leave.”
“You’re leaving.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
Sister Mary Thomas sits next to her on the step. “I don’t know exactly, but it is. I’m a grown-up, for one. Let’s go back to the church, sweetie. The middle of the night is nothing but trouble.”
“I want to go to the city to see a movie. Come with me.”
“We’ll wait an hour or two for a train. We’ll freeze.”
Betsy shrugs.
“We should go back,” Sister Mary Thomas tells her again.
“Why did you tell me what you told me about running away?” Betsy asks, turning to look at Sister Mary Thomas, studying her pale skin, her brown hair, her lips, the silvery breath painting the air in front of her face.
Sister Mary Thomas thinks about it. “I told you because I thought you could handle it,” she says. “I thought it would give you hope for the future.”
“I’m tired of people thinking I can handle things,” Betsy says.
A train rumbles into the station. Betsy’s so thankful. She needs one and here it is. She runs up the stairs, leaving Sister Mary Thomas behind, hops a turnstile to the bored chagrin of the man in the booth, and races up another short flight of steps to the platform, where the B train has arrived and its doors are gaping, the orange glow of the center car welcoming her. Her breath trails behind her as she launches herself into the car just before the doors ding and smack shut. She settles into a bucket seat and watches through the scratched windows, waiting for Sister Mary Thomas to come chugging up the stairs after her, to bang on the glass and demand that she come back to the lock-in.
But it doesn’t happen that way. The train pulls out. Betsy watches the darkness of the neighborhood, studies it. The dark tops of buildings. Traffic lights changing up and down the avenues.
No one else is in this train car with her, thank God. Just her and the scratched windows and a half-full plastic bottle of 7-UP skittering around on the floor.
She wonders if Sister Mary Thomas will tell the other nuns or call her mother or maybe even call the cops. She’s thinking that maybe she won’t because Betsy has the scoop on her and Sister Mary Thomas wouldn’t want anything to get out before taking off with Father Dave.
She feels bad for Sister Mary Thomas, innocently telling Betsy her plans in trust, not knowing the immediate impact it would have on her. She mostly feels bad because Sister Mary Thomas—even though she’s young and pretty and in love and listens to Madonna—is still dumb the way grown-ups get dumb.
Betsy wonders how people wind up ruined like that and when it will happen to her. Maybe it’s already happening. Maybe she’s at the beginning of the process or she’s in the middle of it, and she doesn’t even know. Maybe you stay up all night, just once, at a lock-in or a slumber party, and the next day you’re never the same. You pass through darkness into the forever darkness of being whatever it is that people become.
The train’s quiet except for the soda bottle.
Betsy thinks of her mom getting a call from Sister Mary Thomas or Sister Erin, that yellow wall-mounted rotary phone ringing in their kitchen, vibrating the wood panels, her mom trudging out to it in her sweats, her stepdad grunting and pulling a pillow up over his head.
Her stepdad’s name is Bob Girgenti. He wants Betsy to take his last name, like her mom has. She’ll never do that. She likes that her last name is the same as her old man’s, Murray, even though he lives in California now and it’s an Irish name and everyone she knows, including her mom and her grandparents, is Italian. She likes that it makes her different.
Her dad is from Ireland, actually born there. His first name is Daniel. He came to Brooklyn with his parents when he was six and they settled in Bay Ridge. He met Betsy’s mom at a bar called the Pied Piper when he was twenty and she was seventeen. He got her pregnant within six months and then they got married at St. Mary’s and her dad moved in with her mom and her grandparents. Betsy was born and they tried to be a family for about seven years. Then her dad was gone one day and her mom spent all her time crying and her grandma tried to comfort her mom by saying things like, “Oh Karen, it just wasn’t meant to be.” And her grandpa kept repeating a line that Betsy wishes she had never heard him say: “Never trust no Mick bum.”
Her dad fell in love with a woman who wanted to be an actress. Her name is Lucy. Daniel and Lucy. They moved to Los Angeles together. Betsy can’t say their names in front of her mom. Her dad hardly writes, never calls. She has his phone number in California memorized. She writes it in the margins of her school notebooks so she’ll never forget it. She’s always wishing she had the guts to call him.
Part of what she hates so much about Bob is that he’s not evil. He’s boring and stupid and sometimes mean, that’s all. But he’s never smacked her or locked her in the basement or even refused to let her eat dinner as punishment for something. So, really, what does she have to complain about? She’s not so young that she hasn’t heard horror stories. Bob’s a lot of things, but he’s not a horror story. She feels guilty because sometimes she secretly wishes he was a horror story. Maybe then she’d know why she felt so lost, so out of place. What if the guilt over not encountering evil is there until one day she actually encounters evil and dealing with that becomes her life from then on?
The train makes its stops, the doors opening and closing, the silence filling with the sound of cold air rushing in. At Sixty-Second Street, a man gets on, and he’s wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit and carrying what looks like a few foil-wrapped sandwiches in a plastic bag. He sits pretty far away from her. She should worry about him, she knows that.
She looks at the floor.
She can feel his eyes on her.
“You okay?” he says. His voice is deep, tired, as if the words are fighting back against a yawn.
“I’m fine,” she says, still not looking over at him.
“You hungry? I got some egg, bacon, and cheese sandwiches in here.” He shakes the bag. “I’m bringing them to work. I always get two for Teddy. He don’t need two.”
“I’m good, thanks,” she says.
“Okay. You just let me know.”
The train dips into a tunnel. The lights flash off and then back on.
“My name’s Frank,” the man says, scooching a few seats closer to her. He’s still a good distance away, but he’s closer and closer’s no good. “What are you doing out on your own in the middle of the night?”
She doesn’t answer, studying the floor between her feet, the remnants of a piece of gum strung like thread from under the seat to the stanchion in front of her.
“The night holds perils for a girl,” Frank continues.
Again, she stays quiet.
“I have a daughter. I wouldn’t want her out here on her own. You’re how old, twelve, thirteen? Where are your parents? What’s your name?”
“My name’s Emily,” she lies, still looking down.
The derelict 7-UP bottle is still shooting around the car. It passes in front of Frank and he stops it with his foot and then reaches down,
unscrews the cap, and takes a swig. He stays quiet after that. He gets off at Thirty-Sixth Street. She’s relieved.
When the train crosses over the Manhattan Bridge, she can’t even see the East River below. She sees dots of light from apartment buildings on the Manhattan side. She goes over and considers the map. She makes a decision to get off at the Broadway-Lafayette stop, thinking she’ll find a movie theater there. How can she not? Her belief is that it’ll be right there when she comes up from the subway: golden, glowing, open.
She wonders what time it is now. It must be past three, maybe even almost four. The train ride was at least forty-five minutes, lots of stopping and starting.
She gets off at Broadway-Lafayette, hustling past a man covered in a ratty black blanket, asleep on a bench. A worker polishes the floor with some kind of humming machine. She runs up a couple of flights of stairs to the street.
There are lights and cars, taxis mostly, but there’s plenty of darkness too. Most of the shops are closed. She doesn’t see a movie theater. She goes over to a newspaper rack and grabs a copy of The Village Voice, which she’s heard of. She flips through, looking for movie times. She’s cold now. She’s on a corner she’s never been on.
She sees an open deli across the street, bright and warm-looking. She walks over. It’s cluttered. Long aisles. Refrigerators full of beer and soda. A freezer with ice pops. She orders a coffee because that seems like the right thing to do. Forget lollipops.
The guy behind the counter doesn’t think twice about her or what she’s doing out at this time. He rubs his hands together and blows into them and pours her a coffee in a blue paper cup. She pays with her twenty and gets a ten, a five, some singles, and quarters and pennies back. She puts the money in her pocket. She flips open the plastic lid on the cup and blows into the steam. She doesn’t put in milk or sugar. She drinks it black and burns her upper lip.
She has The Village Voice under her arm. She spreads it out on the counter and finally gets to the movie pages. She can’t find anything starting at this time.
She’s not sure what to do. She thinks about the change in her pocket. There are at least two quarters. “You have a payphone?” she asks the guy behind the counter.
He nods. “Outside. Right around the corner.”
She leaves the paper there and goes out to the payphone, setting the coffee down on the sidewalk between her feet. She looks all around, hoping not to be noticed by taxi drivers and cops and other assorted creeps that prowl the streets at night.
It’s three hours earlier in California. She says her dad’s number out loud and then realizes that a couple of quarters won’t cover a long distance call. She can go in and get more change or she can just call collect. Collect makes more sense. She needs to save her money.
The operator puts the call through, and her dad accepts the charges. “Betsy, is everything okay?” he asks, his voice weary. “What is it? What happened, honey?”
She hasn’t heard his voice in so long. He sounds like someone she’s never known. She puts her hand over the mouthpiece to hide the sounds from passing cars and talks in a whisper: “Dad, I’m trapped,” she says. “Please help. They’ve got me locked in a basement. Please. I don’t know what to do. Please.” And then she hangs up, trying to duplicate what it’d be like if her line has been cut off.
She’s not sure what her purpose is. It’s more than a prank. She wants her dad to worry. She wants him to panic. She guesses he’ll call her mom and her mom will call the nuns and there will be all sorts of chaos. But here she is now in the dead of night in the city with only her coffee and her trusty red sweater and a little money to burn. There’s got to be a movie playing somewhere.
The Night Mountain
Jeffrey Alan Love
There is a mountain that lives in the night. Do you see it?
We walked in darkness. It was a long way to go. Perhaps it never ended, and this was what I deserved. To climb forever. To never know rest. To push my way through grasping branches and brambles, to bark my shins on ancient rocks, to be shat on by these two bone-white birds that hung silent, floating, just beyond my reach. At times I saw the lights of distant cities through a thinning of trees. Far below on the dark plains. Who moves down those streets, I wondered. Who sits at those windows and watches the night mountain?
Lina walked ahead of me, the baby in her arms. She never slowed, never seemed to tire. She had always been strong. I carried the box in one hand. Behind me, his panting breath loud in my ears, came the beast-faced man.
The baby was not yet a week old when the beast-faced man delivered the box.
It was a small box, made even smaller by being in the beast-faced man’s oversized hands. It was made of wood, dark-grained and polished in such a way that looking at it you felt you saw a great distance within it. That if you held it up to your eye you would see things long hidden, long wished for, nightly dreamed of and then forgotten. All the things that fled with waking. That it might be a small window to another place, a place where someone like the beast-faced man made sense, for he didn’t make much sense to me standing there on my porch in his flapping black clothes, his wild and knotted hair, his beard that could not conceal his teeth.
He was my wife’s brother, though I did not know that then.
“You the father,” he said, his voice a low thrum I felt in my guts. “Congratulations.”
I found I could not look away from the box, from his hands, whether it was the box itself that held me bewitched or fear of looking directly at his face I could not say. There was no breeze, but his hair moved at the edges of my vision, the locks curling and uncoiling like so many snakes. He held out the box to me.
“For the mother.”
I hesitated, so he reached out, gently took my hand, and folded it around the box. His hands were rough, the skin thick, but his touch was tender, as though he was afraid of breaking either of us. The box was warm, and I thought I felt the slightest of scrapings from within it as it curled into my palm. An odor rose from it in slow pulses that reminded me of early morning runs on streets wet with rain.
“For the mother,” he said again, and then he was gone, as if he had never been there.
In my hand breathed a box.
The beast-faced man had been surprised when I stepped through the box with Lina and the baby. Perhaps he thought I had no idea, that I was blissfully unaware of certain facts. That I was in the dark.
She came to me from out of a lake, I wanted to say. I have some idea. I know some things.
I know enough to be afraid.
“There’s the little fellow,” the beast-faced man said, looking down upon the baby. “What’s his name?”
Lina said something quietly then, words I could not understand, but whatever it was it was not my son’s name.
“His name is Alexander,” I said. Lina reached over and squeezed my hand. I bent down and kissed the top of Alexander’s head, breathed in the perfect smell of him.
“Well, if his name is Alexander than mine is Bel,” said the beast-faced man. He held out his hand to me, and I shook it. His touch was not so gentle this time, but I was able to look him in the eye now. In the night his eyes glinted, and when he spoke the inside of his mouth flared as though a flame lived inside of him.
“He won’t be able to keep up,” said the beast-faced man to Lina as he released my hand. “Say your goodbyes now.”
“He’ll keep up,” said Lina.
Bel laughed, licked his teeth.
And then we had begun to walk. Though it was night, it was not dark yet. I could see the trunks of the trees, the sawtoothed grasses that waved and thrashed, a giant bridge in the sky that stretched from horizon to horizon. Clouds moved as a sea above us, high and twisting, crashing and sliding against each other. They were gray, pewter, lit at times from within by strobing flashes. In their movement I saw the shape of a spear, the scales of a snake, the six-fingered hand of a god.
Now Lina held the baby so that his head rested on
her shoulder. He no longer slept. His eyes were open. He watched me as we climbed.
Behind me Bel roared, and Lina changed direction slightly. Further up, always up, the night mountain’s slope. Weaving through the darkness, between the night trees, the two birds like ghosts haunting our heads. Lina’s face turned away from me, her hair hanging like a veil.
My son’s eyes twinkled in the night.
Before the baby was born everyone talked about the joy to come, and no one talked about the fear. No one had told me how I would feel as I stood in the dark listening to him breathe for the first time, more aware of his body than my own. That I would gladly stop my own breath if it meant his could go on forever. I couldn’t sleep for fear of what might happen if I wasn’t there to hear it. To prime his lungs, his little hummingbird heart, with my fear.
We broke free of the trees to an endless rising expanse of dark rock. The bone birds followed, and swooped down around my head, by my ears. As they swung past they whispered to me in a language I did not know.
“Do not talk to them,” said the beast-faced man behind me. “They are tricksters. They will act otherwise, but all they want is to chew on your liver, pluck out your eyes, unspool your brain.”
“What do you want?” I asked, not looking back.
“This,” he said. “My sister home. Forgiven. Safe.”
We walked on in silence for a minute. Lina, with her long strides, was far beyond us.
“But I also want her happy,” he said.
The birds laughed, and he waved his arm to shoo them away.
I slipped then, and fell heavily onto the stone slope. The birds sang. The beast-faced man helped me up, and on his fingers I saw blood. I had sliced my hand open upon a ridge of sharp rock and felt nothing. He sniffed at the blood on his fingers, rubbed them together, and then looked at me.
“When she came to you, how did you think this could possibly end?”
The Outcast Hours Page 39
